The Kingmaker

“So you made it?”

The concern threading my father’s voice kicks in my instinct to reassure him. He needs lots of reassuring. Ever since Mama disappeared, he worries constantly.

I get it. He’s a professor of Native American Studies. He knows the statistics. Four in five American Indian women have experienced violence, and more than one in two have experienced sexual violence. Even knowing the facts, he never expected them to hit so close to home. He and my mother never married, and didn’t always see eye to eye on how I should be raised, but I know he never stopped caring for her and was devastated when she disappeared.

“We made it, yeah.” I lean against the wall outside our hostel room. “I’m fine. The hostel’s great. Amsterdam’s beautiful.”

“Please be careful, Lenn. Three pretty young girls in a foreign country—you could be snatched off a corner in broad daylight. You know not to drink anything you’re not sure of. God, not to mention sex trafficking.”

I’ve heard his concern veer into panic before, so I stop him before it goes there. “Dad, did you watch Taken again?”

His guilty silence provides my answer.

“No one is going to snatch me off a corner, or traffic me or sell my virginity to the highest bidder.”

“Could we not discuss your virginity? I’m not prepared for this.”

“I’m twenty-one, and believe me, my father is the last person I want to discuss my sex life with, too.” Non-existent, though it is . . .

“Could you also avoid using the word ‘sex’ in the same sentence as . . . well, you?” he asks. “Men are pigs. I’ve told you this, right?”

“Um, on more than one occasion. I believe you once called your species the scourge of the earth, and told me they were basically petri dishes with bad intentions.”

“I stand by that assessment.”

“Yeah, well, you’ll be happy to know I’m not even in the lab, so to speak. Maybe I’m asexual? Or broken? I just don’t ever meet guys who seem worth my time, ya know?”

“When I asked you not to use the word sex in the same sentence as you, that included asexual. But, baby, you’re not broken. You’re . . . discriminating. In the good, picky way, not in the systemic racist way.”

“Yeah, I figured.”

“All jokes aside,” he says, his voice dropping, sobering, “someone will feel more special than the rest.”

I want to ask if Mama felt more special to him than the rest. I want to ask if he ever cries for her, like I still do. Does grief hit him in the most unexpected times and hang over the day until he wants to crawl back in bed and sleep so he won’t remember she’s gone and never coming back? Does she come to him in his dreams?

Or is that just me?

They weren’t together for years before she died, and it makes me wonder if I’m the only person on Earth still hurting this way for her. If her memory only lives in my heart like a knife lodged between my ribs. Grief is its own kind of intimacy, a bond of sorts between you and the one you lost. No one else feels it the way you do about that person you loved most. And maybe it helps to know someone reaches that same level of despair. That’s what family is for, right?

I wish I could go back to the night of my Sunrise Dance and beg her not to go to that protest. Ask her, just this once, to let someone else fight the world’s problems because I needed her more than everyone else did.

“Lenn, you still there?”

I shake off the helplessness of done deals and irreversible things, and straighten from the wall. “Yeah, I’m here. Sorry. Time difference has me out of it. I just wanted to let you know I got here safely.”

“Thank you for that.”

“I’m sure you have a stack of papers waiting to be graded so I’ll let you go. You need a social life, old man.”

“You’re right,” he says, his voice lightening. “So you’ll be happy to hear I might be getting one. I have a date tonight.”

I frown and blink and lick my lips and tug on my ear. Apparently the thought of my father on a date makes me fidgety. “A-a date? Wow. Good. Good for you.”

“Yeah?” he asks with unexpected tentativeness.

I think of my father as I usually see him. Distracted in that way academicians often are, lost in a pile of papers he’s grading or books he’s reading or something he’s researching. His gray eyes always half-hazed with whatever task I interrupted. He deserves more than that.

“Yeah, I’m happy for you, Dad. Do I know her?”